New E-Reader Display Aims at Video and Color

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A new prototype e-reader display offers a small window into the
future of these evolving devices. It's able to show new pages
quickly enough to play videos, and its white background is
brighter than a magazine's white pages — an important component
for making color e-readers, says the prototype's lead creator,
engineer Jason Heikenfeld.

The prototype paves the way for e-readers
that combine the best of readers and tablet computers, along with
some abilities neither technology has. E-readers in the future
could be very thin and light, show colors and videos, use little
battery and be easy to read in sunlight, said Heikenfeld, who
leads the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of
Cincinnati and conducts research for an e-reader display company,
Gamma Dynamics. [SEE ALSO:Will Tablets Kill E-Readers?]

"If you want to make something like an iPad you can roll up and
put in your pocket, this is the type of technology that can
enable that type of breakthrough," Heikenfeld told TechNewsDaily.

The prototype Heikenfeld and his Cincinnati colleagues made would
still need years of work before it shows up in a roll-able
tablet. It usually takes years of continued research and funding
from investors to turn a research advance into a consumer
product, Heikenfeld said.

In a paper they
published today (Oct. 30), Heikenfeld and his colleagues
reported on their new display, which shows black-and-white
images, is about 6 inches wide and has a resolution of 150 pixels
per inch. The most basic Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble
Nook display just fewer than 170 pixels per inch.

Whiter and faster

The new e-paper is made with a white, plastic sheet that's 10
times thinner than a sheet of paper. The plastic is coated with
aluminum, to help it reflect light better, and it's pricked with
pores that are invisible to the naked eye.

To show text or images, the display pushes ink from behind the
white sheet, through the pores and onto the front of the sheet.
This type of movement is usually much faster than the technology
that switches pixels between black and white in Kindles, Nooks
and other e-readers on the market, Heikenfeld said. "You
typically switch over a 100 times faster over similar distances,"
he said.

Heikenfeld's display is able to change what it shows about 67
times a second, which is fast enough for videos.

The aluminum-coated plastic sheet also better hides black ink
behind it than current e-reader displays. That's the key to its
brighter white background. Heikenfeld compared basic e-reader
displays to thinly painted white walls that still show some of a
darker paint job underneath. "If you have a black wall in your
house and you want to paint it white, you know one coat won't do
it," he said.

That bright white not only makes for a display that looks more
like glossy magazine pages, it could help researchers create
e-readers that show color. Of course, the liquid crystal
displays on tablets already show color, but they do so by shining
colored lights out of the screen. E-readers, on the other hand,
create colors by reflecting incoming light. They use much less
power, are easier to read in sunlight and are thinner than LCDs.

Adding color inks to e-readers darkens their displays, Heikenfeld
explained. By making a whiter display to start with, the Novel
Devices Lab's technology builds in a cushion for the darkening
effects of color inks, he said.

"Now you're starting to capture a lot of the advantages you have
in an iPad screen, but you can see in it in sunlight," Heikenfeld
said.

Grayscale and color next

The Novel Devices Lab is now trying to show grayscale images
using their new display tech, Heikenfeld said. Gamma Dynamics is
working on displaying color.

Another important next step will be to make larger versions of
the display. "Our goal is to make this on a roll. We're talking
about a roll 8 to 12 inches wide," Heikenfeld said.

He and his colleagues published their work in the journal Nature
Communications.